By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 13, 2005

Drew (Orlando Bloom), the young hero of Cameron Crowe's enchanting new comedy, "Elizabethtown," is a former golden-boy designer of a Nike-like Portland shoe company whose six-year-long, personal project has just produced the Edsel of tennis shoes.

Not just a flop or even a spectacular failure but a billion-dollar-losing "fiasco" that is about to be screamed from the covers of the nation's business journals, make his name synonymous with catastrophe and leave him no career option beyond hari-kari.

And just when it seems things can't get worse, he gets word that his father has dropped dead while visiting relatives in his Kentucky hometown of Elizabethtown, and, as the oldest son, Drew is expected to journey there and take care of the funeral arrangements.

But all this is just the setup, and the movie doesn't get going until Drew meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst), a flight attendant who elbows her way into his life during the journey east, and stays in it with the cheerful persistence of Bugs Bunny after Elmer Fudd.

Meanwhile, Drew's mother (Susan Sarandon) is falling apart back in Portland, his father's side of the family is balking at the idea of a cremation and Drew is struggling to come to terms with his vast career failure, the father he never really knew, and the meaning of life.

A testy critic could point out that the film is as impossibly optimistic about the blessings of failure as director Frank Capra at his corniest, and -- coming on the heels of two box-office disappointments -- represents an effort on Crowe's part to be ingratiating.

With an eye toward the teenage audience, the director -- who wrote a book on golden-age movie comedy and repeatedly has decried the substitution of crudity for wit in today's Hollywood -- also breaks his principles to treat us with both a vomit gag and an epic penis joke.

Still, the crudity is brief and carried out with an original flair, and, while the movie is hopeful, amiable and buoyant, it's not exactly serendipitous, and even stares here and there at the meaninglessness of life and the cold inevitability of death.

"Elizabethtown" is that rare animal, a dialogue-driven comedy -- and a good one at that. While one or two of its scenes may seem a tad too talky for today's low-attention spans, the script is mostly razor-sharp acerbic and sophisticated.

As a director, Crowe has managed to grow with each of his films and, while his presence is light and unobtrusive, he's acquired a touch that's vaguely reminiscent of his idol, Billy Wilder, and the best of his scenes here have a distinctively pleasing glow.

Bloom, who suffered a fiasco of his own in the badly miscast summer flop "Kingdom of Heaven," exonerates himself with a performance of deadpan perfection. He could hardly be better as the gutted, blank-faced young man at the end of his rope.

As the Southern sprite out to deliver him from his downward spiral of pessimism, Dunst is even more endearing. Her performance -- part Carole Lombard, part Mary Poppins, part Tinkerbell -- is so spirited and fairylike that it seems to sprinkle the whole movie with pixie dust.